Related Content

About the Author

Jacob Gube is the Founder and Chief Editor of Six Revisions. He’s also a web developer/designer who specializes in distance-learning education, front-end development, and web accessibility. If you’d like to connect with him, head on over to the contact page and follow him on Twitter: @sixrevisions.

57 Comments

I always felt that I.E. held a decisive advantage in terms of user-experience over all other browsers. The line has become blurred since the release of FF 1.0 and the field is leveling. I believe that I.E. lack of standards and w3c proposal adoption will be a strong blow against penetration of it’s next-generation browsers.

This has been done already much better than this; what a horrible overview and you miss some other browsers in between and other significant events. But to be expected of an internet nuub! You definitly weren’t around long on teh internets lol And one giant graphic? come on this is a WEB page you failed at any semantic value this should have by being broken down to, what, oh, a WEB PAGE and not a giant useless jpg

Fun fact – dating back over a decade to the present… type about:mozilla in a mozilla based browser :~) – Would have been nice to see the evolution of Firefox from Phoenix thru Firebird and eventually, Firefox. Thanks! Jim – @seo_web_design on twitter

I’m assuming by “top action bar” you’re talking about the address bar. The row of buttons (the “toolbar”) already existed in many apps, and was graphically codified and promoted by Microsoft in the first GUI coding guidelines for Windows 3 (early 1990). I still have my notebook from Microsoft University where we wrote a Tic-Tac-Toe app where fully 2/3rds of the code was toolbar code!

In contrast, X-Windows Unix apps liked big slab-like buttons, also usually arrayed along the top, or they would have vertical text toolbars, as you show in TB-L’s first browser (written on a NeXTcube)

@Sean Hurley: Wow, you just inspired me on a potential topic, thanks for that! (If i ever get around to making something like that – I’ll place a credit to your comment here).

@Jim Summer: Yet another great idea for this format. That can be tricky to do but worth the effort (I’d have to scour the internet for screen grabs of beta releases of FF).

@Dan: Thanks Dan – what I would hate to have happen is that everything gets glossed over because of a spelling mistake. I acknowledge the fault, and I corrected it as soon as I could.

@Paiman Roointan: All milestones that could’ve been included here.

@john: I was anticipating someone would leave that comment about Lynx. I chose to focus on graphical web browsers, but you’re right that Lynx is a pioneering web browser. Originally, the graphic had a note about how it was on “graphical browsers”, but I chose to edit that bit out for superficial reasons in the final version (regretting it now).

@Jay Carlson: Haha! :) And because I’m a jerk, I’d like to point out here that Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web (or “the web”), not the internet. Internet protocols that we use today already existed or were being developed when he proposed the world wide web ideas, he just brought them all together to construct an internet-connected information medium (world wide web). However, I do understand that the world wide web and “the internet” has become synonymous and interchangeable terms in our lexicon.

That was pretty fun. I would like to see some real numbers on who is where statistically. If you look close at the stats you find online the sites have the fine print (from users that visited this site) and in most cases it is us techy nerds visiting the site and not the ie users.

@Roy: Toolbar is a better (and more accurate) term for it, thanks for the information.

@Brad C: Partly inspired by your infocomics – though I can’t draw (like you can)! I feel it gives me a break and I have a bit more liberty in terms of layout.

I must confess though that I got lazy with the longdesc alternative for screen reader users – I’m going to get that up soon.

@Derek: Any particular reason for the Google hate? I currently use Google Chrome when I’m off-duty since I think it handles RIA’s and websites that use Ajax heavily (i.e. Digg) much better than Firefox’s most recent release. I can’t say I’m much of a Safari fan, though I’d use it over IE (7 and below).

Hi Jacob, great list but try to reflect the truth the next time about where the inspiration came from :P. You say IE7 took some features from FF like tabbed browsing and antiphishing… yes, the same FF adopted from Opera…You missed IE8!

And whats for the actual browser war and browser share? In some areas Firefox 3.x is already the leading browser. And what about IE8? The basics of your overview are nice, but it lacks at lot of details essential for “the browser story”.

I’m currently on Chrome too. Specially at home. At work, I do deal with a lot of unfortunate IE6-only stuff (knowledge mangement, in RoboHelp specially); must say it is a mess, but lately we look at the breaking of IE6 more like a team building activity hahaha. Also use FF 3.x at work and at home. Not sure why, Chrome is way more efficient to me.

Calling this a “history” is like calling a couple of index cards an encyclopedia. There are so many more facets of browser history such as Mosaic being open source and borrowed/stolen for Netscape and Microshaft’s Spyglass (later Infernal Exploder), the plethora of niche browsers (many based on Active-X) in the late 1990s, and the failed history of WAP.

these history is realy a great help…because im currently work on a assignment, but the worst thing is, i dnt understand and im confuse of thoase comment above, because i dnt know if this the whole history of browser…

This comment section is closed. Please contact us if you have important new information about this post.